This is an artistic reconstruction of the holy Mount Tabor, produced using the geodesic lines from a topographic map of the mountain.

In the project The Sun of Truth, Goodness and Beauty (2003), I had already treated the theme of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ as the apogee of the union between the aesthetic and the ethical. In that earlier project, I had attempted with “non-handmade” technologies to reveal the very fact of the ineffable Transfiguration of Our Lord. In Tabor I have attempted to approach this same theme apophatically via the image of ascension and elevation, of movement towards this summit of the unity of Godmanhood known as the Kingdom of Heaven. Here I am primarily interested in form as movement, form as function – artistic categories that were actively elaborated already by the first Russian avant-garde – within the contemporary cultural context.

My work is an architectural model (scaled approximately 1:50) of a structure that I would like to erect in some open space. Ideally, I would want to build this handmade mountain on such a scale that each terrace of this ziggurat would be the same size as a staircase step or, better yet, slightly larger, so that the ascent to the summit would involve some palpable effort. Viewers are as it were invited by the form of the art object itself to participate in the action, to involve themselves in a happening, in the process of elevation, which also presumes transfiguration to some degree. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father” (John 14:12).